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The carefully considered placing and hanging of the parts that make up the year-long #365ArtDrops piece went on this weekend. They are never “dropped”, always carefully placed, time taken to find the right place, the right colours. Parts 205 to 215 went out (well besides part 213, just didn’t find the right spot for part 213, that one is still in the big black bag with the pencils and sketch books, waiting for the moment). This weekend pieces painted on deconstructed Andy Warhol flavoured washing powder boxes went out, pieces painting on hardwood taken from a skip outside a building site on an East London Street, on wooden offcuts found outside a woodwork shop under a railway arch in Hackney. The pieces were placed next to Sunday afternoon buskers in the late summer sunshine just off the Columbia Road flower market, next to cat cafes in Rivington Street, Shoreditch, in just about still-in-use red telephone boxes in Hackney, on big blue padlocked doors on Mare Street….

#365ArtDrops Part 211

Over two hundred pieces “dropped” and out there now, all hash-tagged and such so people can respond – and people responding is a very big part of it, the photos of people with their pieces and the news of where they have got to is all part of this year-long piece of work. Where have those two hundred paintings gone? Spotted one hanging on a gallery wall in East London next to a Tracey Emin the other day, several pieces have turned up in galleries now, kind of interesting, got a request from a West End gallery to come hang some on their walls, but formally hanging them in galleries is really not what this piece of work is about. If people from galleries are finding them on the street and choosing to take them and hang them or even sell them (as I heard one had done recently) then that is part of the process, once a piece is out on the street then off it goes, out of my hands and beyond my control – it might end up on a London gallery wall with a price tag on it, on a bedroom wall in Oxford or an office wall in Oakland California (all of which have happened, the gallery didn’t communicate), I have no control once the piece has been “dropped”, once it goes out there then off it goes. I suspect quite a number end up in landfill or just thrown away, and one part hung out a couple of months ago was destroyed on the same day that we hung it out., more about that one later (someone came along with a can of black spray paint and well, painted over the piece and left it there hanging, I eventually got it back, more about it later, it got repainted and put back out there this weekend)

#365ArtDrops Part 215

So where are all these pieces going? We know about maybe fifty or so of them, but what of the rest? We need photos, we had hoped the hashtag #365ArtDrops would encourage people to post photos and tell us they had a piece. Got approached from a book publisher last week wanting to put a book out early next year, kind of like the idea, it wasn’t the intention when this piece started, when it started it was all about recycling unwanted bits of things, that and social media interaction, it was about the moment, about pieces of art not needing a gallery, about using wasted resources, about interacting with people, about just leaving a piece of art, something painted on something that wasn’t wanted anymore for someone to hopefully take and enjoy. .

Here’s our photos of this weekend’s “drops”, click on an image to enlarge or run the slide show. We had an enjoyable hour sitting listening the busker and watching people